Eve: Original Sinner or Original Victim?
Abrahamic religions have played a central role in the shaping of society - our institutions, behaviors, and beliefs - for centuries. Misogyny as we know it was primarily codified through the story-telling of the “original sin” - the myth that woman, Eve, was tricked by the serpent into eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, causing God to cast her and Adam from the garden of eden, forever condemning all of mankind to inherit her sin.
The myth of woman’s first transgression has been used to naturalize and justify women’s oppression under men’s authority. These biased beliefs about women’s inherent nature rooted in Biblical scripture are found in the social response to every conflict between woman and man, including allegations of abuse: the abused woman is treated as if she committed the original sin, naivety and gullibility projected onto her. Society plays the role of God, warning the woman to take precautions while simultaneously asking her to blindly trust. The serpent is the abuser, manipulating the trust God demanded of Eve to bypass the precautions she was told to take. Society - playing the role of God - becomes omniscient, entitled to pass judgement, blaming Eve, not the serpent, for not heeding their warning, forsaking their lessons and misplacing the trust asked of her. Adam - poor, blameless Adam - is a stand-in for all men: burdened with the blame of the serpent’s abuse, scrutinized for his possible complicity even though he remains inherently innocent, and ultimately scorned by Eve’s disobedience, assigned to an undesirable life because of the myopic actions of one woman.
This response, informed by patriarchal religion, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: if a woman behaves as society has dictated she should, she will be safe from harm. If she disobeys then it was her own fault harm - here, abuse - befell her; she has no one to blame but herself. This is the reification of the Madonna/whore dichotomy, creating the illusion of two separate classes of women: women who are immune to harm and women who open themselves up to harm; men, including those who inflict the harm, are absent from the equation. The Madonna - the woman who behaves - can place herself above the whore, comforted with the knowledge that she will heed the warnings, she will listen and behave, she won’t misplace her trust; she will be shielded from abuse thanks to the teachings of society. This is an appealing belief because women don’t have the power to create their own justice when victimized; following these arbitrary rules creates a false sense of autonomy and power. But this begets a culture where all abuse against women becomes justified through some transgression on the part of the woman; she remains the Madonna through luck, she becomes the whore through the actions of men.
Meanwhile abusive men are given the benefit of the doubt, pardoned because society sees Adam - not the serpent - in him. They see this as the cyclic nature of the original sin: an innocent man punished for the foolish deeds of a woman. They promise not to let that injustice happen again; they free him from scrutiny, from responsibility, and level their ire at Eve. Taken to the extreme, this can be seen in the moral panic over false accusations: Eve, the accuser, either irrationally misinterprets a man’s intentions or maliciously blames him for her shortcomings and her misdeeds. In this way women are convinced not to come forward about their abuse at the hands of men; it’s only through the silencing of women that the burden of the original sin is lifted from the shoulders of men.
But who is ever the serpent if all men are Adam? The serpent, as always a myth, has left our collective conscious. We're left with the eternally imprudent woman, Eve, and the eternally innocent man, Adam; and us, the omniscient God, looking down upon the relations of women and men, deciding we know the truth better than those involved.
This essay was inspired by Chris Wind's 1987 sound collage poem "I Am Eve." Thank you to Women's Liberation Radio News for playing the recording on edition 55: A Feminist Analysis of Christianity.